Some poets write in a minimalist, Eastern style that reads
like a sutra or a prayer, as opposed to the at-times very dense poetry of
Western writers. Poets writing in the former style give the reader ample space
in which to graft their interpretations and morph their experiences with the
work, allowing their poems to operate like myths, folk tales, and fairytales.

It was five years ago that I first reviewed Ed Baker’s work,
when I received for the purpose his Restoration
Letters (1972–1978)—co-authored with Cid Corman—and his solo book, Restoration Poems(1972–2007). I had been a fan of his writing and goddess
illustrations for years prior, and since publishing that review, we have kept
in touch through email.

Neighbor unfolds like
a classic mystery (at least to this reader, who has recent experience writing
in the genre) without a murder; a noir-ish exploration of the complicated
relationship of the narrator and the troubled woman who lives next door to a
house in which the narrator seems to be doing renovations.

The book is broken into five sections (Arousal, Calling Her,
Shades, Fu:sion, and Intersections), the poetry interlaced with some of Baker’s
line sketches, reminiscent of his well-known goddess drawings.

Neighbor quickly
places the reader in the role of voyeur, much like watching a play in a
darkened theatre, where the “fourth” wall has been removed and your
participation in what unfolds is implicit rather than explicit.

With his ladder propped against a wall, the narrator let’s
us look, vicariously, through a window. There is a letter slipped under a
kitchen door.

“a woman
waiting/invitations

getting to
know her”

She tells him: “My father molested me when I was young”; the
narrator later confirms she was “gone into by her father.” She is troubled,
self-sexualized, and perhaps unstable.

Their “relationship” is consummated fairly quickly, the
narrator describing her sexual appetites, capabilities, and her body with an
initial reverence reminiscent of the poetry of Leonard Cohen and Rod McKuen:

“eaten her
ripe fig from

tree of
heaven between

her there and me ...”

But over time, the metaphorical reverence melts away, and we
are left with the bluntness of

“her/black/cunt”

Time passes, and my read is that the narrator is doing odd
jobs for the neighbor. There is wiring and ladders, and continuous imagery of
her garden, which she tends, while he works. Their relationship continues its
dynamic tension, power constantly shifting, with the narrator professing:

“deliberately/I had kept/my/distance”

even as he tries to “get a better/view/across the way/for
days shades/up/blinds open”

“the shade was up”

In both the poems and the illustrations (a series of
abstract line drawings of the female shape, open and impressionistic) the
window and its shades and blinds are prevalent. Both passageways and a code,
these are the mechanisms of memory, as one is titled: “A Man Contemplates
Sketch Pinned to Wall.”

In the sub-section “Calling Her” the voyeurism increases:
“her shadow-dance/behind the drawn/shade”

Or later in the book, in a poem called “The Eyes”:

“shade/drawn/changes/meanings”

Throughout the book there is admonition by the narrator that
the poems and drawings are most important; the imagination more real than the “reality”
of the trysts:

“as this run
of poems the

book is
become yet to be

broadcast”

“it was
never her/mound that he had/wantedit was/

on a poem
that/his words had made”

“he had
drawn her/like she had/drawn him”

But the
poetry then seems to work upon her, drawing her in (or out):

“…one line/sentence/gets/her/outside…

tinted
windows/all around auto”

Although, as
we see, even the windows of her car have the potential to hide her secrets.

Within the dynamic tension, there is at times overlap with
the structural and sexual:

“back
doorwide invitation to

enter her”

And
Kafka-esque perceptual transformation, as he likens her to a mantis that

“sucked/him/ate/him”

As the book
proceeds, the illustrations begin to change. Just before the section entitled
“Fu:sion” there are two portraits that might be of the author/narrator. In the
1999 drawings, the female subject looks skeletal and monstrous.

By this
stage in their voyeuristic dance, it is clear just how much she enjoys the
game:

“her habit
was/to watch him/watching her”

In the final
section, “Intersections,” the narrator more fully articulates the somewhat
selfish nature of the relationship:

“he had had
his own ex-/pectations of woman/in the window”

and in the
next to last poem:

“it/had/never/been/her/sex/that
he was after”

In its
movement from voyeurism, to passionate sex, to the roller-coaster of rejection
and reunion, to the admonition that it was all about the art, Neighbor takes us on a journey full of
shadow and mystery, leading the reader to the harder questions about why we do
what we do, both as people and through our expression of our experiences as art.